Thursday, January 8, 2015

Day 6: 4-Bar & the Q&A

4-Bar Arm Prototype

This is our current arm prototype. It can stack totes and put an RC (Recycling Container) on top of 4 scored totes.

Problems we are still trying to solve:

How to support the totes to keep them level, or tilted above level.

How to quickly release totes from our arm when we are stacking them on top of each other.

How to align to totes quickly and accurately.

We have a few ideas for some quick pneumatic actions that could help us to accomplish a few of these goals. We should be able to have them tested by tomorrow or Saturday.

Q&A

The Q&A opened this Wednesday, and some interesting answers have already been provided.

Q&A 5defines the Auto and Landfill Zones as volumes and not areas, so a team cannot start with any portion of its robot hanging into them. This important clarification makes getting to the RCs on the step at the beginning of auton somewhat more difficult.

Q&A 7 was asked by our team. This year, the GDC is allowing teams to have pole-mounted cameras on their operator consoles. This could lead to some cool uses for drivers and auton.

- Spectrum

“Help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.”- Jim Rohn